Now what's the plan for this little gem I here you say??
Well once back at unit I decided to take it for a little drive round the farm. I can tell you this, It was neither fast, fuel efficient or had any modern comforts at all. Being completely honest it drivers like an utter pig, not because there's anything wrong with it, its just old tech.
Me and my friends discussed a couple of options, it was apparent that whatever was going to power this van needed to be common rail diesel with plenty of torque and have a way of either adapting the standard management into the Mk2 or have some sort of aftermarket ECU capable of powering it. A 2.2 Mk8 setup was pretty favourable as they map to around 200bhp but I could just forsee it being a pig to get running. The radio in a Mk8 is an integrated part of the dash and has the menu functions built into it, thus ditching the funky shaped radio meant ditching the menu functions. The Mk7 would be far easier to integrate into the Mk2 but the 2.4 (even mapped) wouldn't offer the power I wanted and although fitting a diff better suited for acceleration, I want to drive this van out to Europe and having something screaming at 3500rpm at 70mph just made me quiver.
It hit me like a bang exactly what with van needed. Sadly a very rare gem was going to have to give its life for my project but this van needed a MK7 3.2TDCI. 250bhp is achievable with basic modifications, they are fuel efficient and have enough torque to turn the world backwards.
A couple of days later I was driving home is this quite awful coloured 3.2 jumbo limited.
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The plan is to fit as much of this van into my MK2 while retaining the retro looks inside and outside. I want the ABS, TC, AC, EW, CL, HSA the lot fully working and functioning in my MK2. As I want all the functionality and something that drives really nicely its clear to me that the front subframe, Uprights etc is all going to have to go into the MK2. I've never done this level of fabrication before so I am a bit nervous.
The first thing to do was to break up the jumbo, which if I'm honest I was gutted to do. Id only driven it a couple of hundred miles home but I was very attached of what was such an awesome van. I just had to keep the end result in sight. (No the front bumper is available, It was sold ages ago)
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I needed the front suspension mounting points to build a backwards jig from but space was tight and a jumbo shell was a big item to store. I had to give it a little shorten as the rear part was useless to me.
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That's about as far as I've got so far. In the background I have been sorting the registration of the MK2 with the DVLA which actually turned out to be pretty painless and is now sorted and I fitted a towbar to the Mk2 for the sole purpose of this photo...
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